Mind your language
HERE ARE some odds and ends which I hesitate to call a cabinet of curiosities.
`What does grimpen mean, as in "Grimpen Mire"?' a reader asks. Well, I don't know. The Grimpen Mire finds a place, of course, in the action of Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. T. S. Eliot, in 'East Coker', writes:
In the middle, not in the middle of the way But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble, On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, Risking enchantments.
The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary cites no earlier exam- ple apart from Conan Doyle, so it looks like Eliot got part of his inspiration for Four Quartets from reading Sherlock Holmes stories.
I have also got a triad of strange locu- tions. Why does everyone speak of `Baby Abbie' when referring to the little child who was taken from her parents and restored to them? We all know that babies in hospital before they are named are sometimes called 'Baby Smith' or whatever. But Abbie is the creature's given name. It's as mysterious as the sudden outbreak of calling the dust of the ground 'dirt' in sporting cir- cles. That is an Americanism.
And two simple peculiarities of pro- nunciation. People on the wireless have started saying constable as if the first syl- lable rimed with don. Perhaps they think the ordinary pronunciation is in some way indelicate.
Finally there is, as ever, the Irish question. In my idiolect the phrase 'the whole island of Ireland' contains no homophones. A lot of people seem to think that to say island covers the lot.
Dot Wordsworth
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